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Excavation

24
Jan 2012

I spent the bulk of my weekend and many evenings last week cleaning. By cleaning, I mostly mean getting rid of things.

I continue to be amazed at how things can collect in corners and unused spaces. I started joking that things kept respawning. I’d clean out a space, only to find more stuff had materialized in the time it took to carry a load to the car. A life lived as fully as possible can lead to this sort of overflowing, I think. That’s what I tell myself when I’m being patient and loving, anyway, lol.

I wonder if ideas work the same way, at least for me. I’ve got a full mind, always have. I don’t do quiet well. I have speakers set up in my bathroom for podcasts while I shower. I listen to Pandora* while I exercise and am apt to knit in front of a great television show.**

I started practicing mindfulness and meditation many years ago and I’m always laughing at myself because there is so much going on in my head. Meditation is more like the me show. Now with less rumination and more random thought bubbles!

Ideas come slow for me, I’ve talked about that before. I wonder if it is a matter of unloading all the busy loud that usually goes on in my mind. I have to clear out the unused “oh don’t forget to”s and “oh hell why did I”s. I have to dig past the same old boring stories I tell myself and look for the stuff I’ve forgotten underneath. My creative mind works, it just lives in the bottom of a cave under a very tall mountain of stuff. My creative mind is apparently a dragon, hoarding its treasure and being very stingy about who’s allowed inside.

Well you know what? It’s the year of the dragon, motherfucker. I’m coming for you.

 

*http://www.pandora.com/#!/stations/edit/6509559808670288 (if you like folk music)

**I used to be one of those snooty anti-tv types. Then I discovered a show called Firefly. From there, I discovered that television has gotten significantly better than the last time I watched it. Now, I don’t feel at all wasteful watching shows like American Horror Story, Dexter, Doctor Who, and Psych. These are brilliant, witty stories written with amazing skill. I see it as research and actively study the story elements I admire in each. I guess I’m a born-again tv enjoyer!

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Friday Flash You

28
Oct 2011

Remember Blackbloom?

The new challenge is to create gods for the world created by the winning choices. Here’s my entry:

Fate

One of the elder gods, Fate is often considered to be the father of Chance, Perseverance, and Poker. No one knows who their mother is.

Fate is the god most often associated with the Games. In ancient times, competitors often sacrificed their first-born children as an attempt to win his favor. Now he’s often a judge and therefore accepts bribes rather than supplication. Everyone agrees this is a better system, apart from those who don’t particularly like their first-born children.

Note: Fate is not to be confused with fate, the concept of the prewritten destiny. That doesn’t exist.

You should go create a god! It’s a great NaNo warm up exercise. Kind of like lunges, but without the burning thighs.

Thanks Chuck Wendig! I’m enjoying these mightily.

ETA: AUGH! I just noticed how often I used the word often.  Rats. You’d think with all the editing I’ve been up to I would have noticed. Amazing how the eye skips right over stuff like that.

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Friday Flash

07
Oct 2011

I FLASH YOU!

Over at Terrible Minds, there’s a little flash project going on that is absolutely fascinating:

These are the only things you know about Blackbloom.

First, that is its name. Blackbloom.

Second, it is a place where human and non-humans alike dwell.

Basically, it is a world building exercise. Write a little bit about Blackbloom. The entries are fantastic, lots of variation and I find myself wishing the stories existed. Go check them out!

For fun and profit (???), here’s my addition:

Blackbloom: a space station orbiting Europa. Earth is in desperate need of fresh water.

Drilling is going well, popular opinion polls tell us we are favored among the human race. Living far from home is weird, but not in a bad way. Last week, A comet flashed by us trailing a cloud of ice crystals. Everything looks different here, so far from the sun.

We’d be perfect if it weren’t for the black tar that gums up the works of the drill. Every day half of us drill and half of us burn away tar. The brains are working on a solution, but so far, burning it off seems to work just fine.

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Ideas

03
Oct 2011

Whenever I read about writing, I always read about people who have so many ideas they simply can’t record them all. They are so busy with ideas and people in their head, they can’t get it out fast enough.

I confess, I’ve felt some ugly jealousy with regard to writers with ideas. I don’t get them like that. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night with ideas (well, once I did, that’s gonna be a weird book). My muse isn’t as much a pretty lady wearing a toga as this:

I read about King’s muse in On Writing. He describes his as a cigar chomping dude in a basement. That image appealed to me for years before I finally stumbled on my own mental muse: a radio. A badly tuned, ancient radio.

Mostly I get static. Especially when I’m looking for a channel. I can spin the dials all I want but all I get is white noise (that’ s a thing, kids, use the googles. Man I’m old.) Every once in a while, when I’m driving or eating dinner or somewhere with no computer or paper, the dial will spin itself and BAM, I’ll find a station playing in my head.

There’s several channels broadcast via Radio Muse, but trust me, none of them are on all the time. Often, the wrong one is on at the wrong time. I panic whenever I’m needing ideas because I don’t get them like that. They aren’t there all the time, they are there when the radio feels like turning on. I get an idea when I’m reading about a Goldilocks planet (last year’s NaNo). I get an idea when my husband has a dream (NaNo ’09). I get an idea while getting tattooed (Worse Things). The ideas are sparse, badly formed and often before I can grab onto them they have slipped away and the radio is back to white noise again. Laughing at me, I think. That radio creeps me out.

All that said and bemoaned, I do get ideas. I’ve got a backlog of ideas now, even, many in messy first draft forms already. I’m so thrilled at this moment, because I actually have things to play with. Books to write. Books to edit. I can actually see myself finishing things and starting new things. The radio finally gave me enough to play with that I feel like I can be a Real Writer ™. I think once I am willing to listen, it gives up a little more each time. Which means I have to keep listening, even when I should be doing other things.

So if you see someone in a minivan lingering at a red light, just give me a little honk. I was probably listening to the radio.

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Here’s what happened

19
Jul 2011

The short version.

In 2005 I was a new mom to a very needy baby. In a desperate attempt to get out of the house, I decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It seemed crazy at the time, but after 30 days of frantic writing I had a little novel to show for it, my very first long piece of fiction. That novel went on to become Triple X, which was nominated for an Eppie award in 2008, much to my delight.

I wrote some more, and published some more, and writing started to look like something I could both do and enjoy doing. A blessed combination, if ever there was one.

In 2008, tragedy struck our household with a surprising force. I nearly died of Deep Vein Thrombosis and subsequent Pulmonary Embolisms. Three months later, we lost a beloved family member to cancer. To be honest, we didn’t cope well. Writing went well to the back burner as we just tried to regroup and survive.

Now here we are, 2011. Suddenly, stories reappeared in my head. I was sure I had given up the writing thing, mind you. But there I was, sitting in a tattooist’s chair, and BAM. Story idea. Big one.  At the same time, my website was hacked and summarily deleted. I’ve lost all my archives, all the blogging and writing I did in the past six years. The universe is telling me to start fresh, so here I am.

This time, I hope to keep going, past tragedies and any other surprises that might come my way. I don’t know what is next, but I’m excited to find out.

And that’s what happened.

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